It seems that a large majority of our friends and neighbors don't think that BP will be able to stop the subsea gusher in the GOM within the next month. A fifth of respondents think they will.
Based, exactly, on what?
Most people lack the expertise to assess the likelihood of success of any activity involving offshore oil drilling--hell, even petroleum geologists and engineers sometimes scratch their heads.
People think that OTOH BP will make everything right. And OTOH they don't trust BP to tell them the truth.
They trust Obama to handle the situation except when they don't. The residents of the Gulf expect BP to make everything right and expect the Gulf to completely recover. This cannot be based on news coverage of the spill, which has ben "all catastrophe, all the time." That plume? A "killer plume, headed for the Keys." Except it wasn't.
The plume? "A subsea lake of oil." Except it wasn't. The oil concentration was about one tablespoon in a swimming pool.
Those Gulf beaches? "Awash in oil." Except they weren't.
The life in the Gulf? "May never recover!" Except it will, according to 8 in 10 respondents.
Polls on anything remotely related to science are used in this country in a shamelessly inappropriate manner to ask people things they have no expertise to have a judgment on, except when they ask them something of such breathless banality that it would make anyone with an IQ over room temperature want to get into a warm bath and open a vein. Think of all the preposterous nonsense about teaching evolution for starters.
So the next time you read the responses to some new poll, ask yourself "who gives a f**k?"
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